Fourth selkie book (or story): “In Salt Sea Tears” by Seanan McGuire

To celebrate the release of my new book, Coral Were His Bones, I’m going to be posting a month’s worth of things about selkies. Coral is a m/m paranormal erotica novel about Finn, a selkie who’s in love with his childhood sweetheart Devon, but bound in a magical contract to a cruel master. It’s a story of modern magic, snark, sex, and how to heal when everything hurts.

In Salt Sea Tears is a short story from Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, and she recommends you read it after the fifth book, One Salt Sea. Selkies feature into the series as a whole, but I thought I’d highlight this short story because it’s all about selkies, and it’s a free download from her website. Selkies and girls in love with each other–I’m in favour of both. She’s done some fantastic, heartbreaking things with the selkie mythology in her books, and her sea witch is much more ambivalent than the sea witch that figures into the Tempest series.

“It was 1972, and a teenage girl named Elizabeth Ryan thought her world was coming to an end. The daughter of two Selkies, Elizabeth had just been passed up for a skin. But when a mysterious cousin who calls herself Annie appears, Elizabeth finds other things to think about…

It can be easy to forget that worlds don’t wait for heroes before they begin. It can be easy to forget that things happened before the lights came up and the story started. This is one of those things that happened: this is one of those tales that slipped through the cracks. It is the story of a girl named Elizabeth, and a girl named Annie, and what they were to one another, in the sight and sounding of the sea.

Bonus-bonus link! I wanted to include Gail Carriger’s short story Marine Biology because it’s about a romance between a gay werewolf and a flirty merman, but had a hard time justifying giving it its own post this week because the selkies are secondary characters. So here it is.